


Episode 4: Fondo Gordo, New Mexico

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Series: The Canyon's Arms Are All We Know [4]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, general danvers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 04:52:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18793384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: Astra figures out how to get by, more or less.





	Episode 4: Fondo Gordo, New Mexico

The aural inserts of the type Astra had been using typically drew their power from the battery life of the pods that they were in closest proximity to.Since Astra’s pod was obliterated, the inserts would give out on her after about two weeks. Wisely, she had reverse engineered them to give herself a crash course, so to speak, in enough of the local language to get around: “hello,” “please,” “thank you,” “it’s alright,” “I’m sorry,” “where is the bathroom?” and perhaps most importantly, “what is the cost of this bag of jerky?”

She had taken the truck driver’s wallet when she knocked him senseless, and to the best of her reckoning, most of what was in it was useless to her.Earl Waller’s identification card was not likely to open any doors for her, as she looked nothing like him. There was some currency in it, and she learned quickly that the amount was limited. 

She took one of the long, silver buses into Santa Fe, a small city which was nestled among the mountains. Earl had been carrying nearly three hundred dollars, but her ticket into the city cost her ten. She learned that omelets, a reasonably high protein and inexpensive form of sustenance, cost four dollars in the area where she had landed but almost seven in the city. Earl’s money wasn’t going to last long in Santa Fe.She discovered something called “thrift stores” which were able to inexpensively furnish her with what seemed to be a military grade jacket in a dark grey-green, something thin but heavy that would keep her warm at nights.

And as she was mostly still spending nights outdoors, that mattered.

She was going to have to find a source of currency. In other words, employment. She would have been revolted at the thought of menial labor once upon a time, but she was in a strange place, the humans’ world wasn’t designed to support those who weren’t part of their systems, and though she was a quick study, the language was still new to her, and foreign to her tongue.

Her last night in Santa Fe, she walked out of a small eatery in a poor part of town —they called it a “diner”, and she had washed dishes there for a few hours for a wad of single dollar bills— and went in search of a warm place to sleep. She found a bus stop, which wasn’t exactly warm, but it was at least shelter from the chilling winds that came whipping in off of the desert. She huddled up with her thick, green jacket on, hands tucked under her arms, and listened on her inserts to a program that she had become fond of.

She didn’t know what the source of the broadcast was, but it was a woman’s voice. She played mostly gentle, wistful sounding songs and mused about things that Astra didn’t fully grasp but sometimes did. Tonight, she was talking about loneliness.This was not a foreign subject.

_“…the funny thing is, so much of love, I think, is just about proximity. If you’re in a situation where you have to become close to someone, day in and day out, you find yourself eventually coming to forgive those little things you can’t stand, and understanding those flaws that bothered you, and then one day, if they up and disappear, it leaves you desolate.You didn’t even realize you loved them but they became part of your world, and now you miss them.”_

There was something comforting about the music she chose, the mournful voices and strange, ringing instruments, and most of all, her warm, gentle voice.The timing of her broadcasts was seemingly random, though they seemed to be mostly in the evenings, and not every evening. Astra wondered who she was, where she was broadcasting from.

Astra decided at this moment that she realized that she missed Non.She hadn’t loved him with the sort of passion that other races seemed prone to doing, but they had accepted one another, as outsiders with a mission.And they had shared a life.It was, she realized, something she missed. And it was, according to the woman with the warm, gentle voice, a species of love.

_“But the most important thing is, love, real love, needs proximity. It needs closeness. You can’t love someone from far away, not really. I think it’s the closeness that sands those edges off, that makes you fit better. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think proximity and intimacy aren’t the same thing, but they’re really hard to separate. You can’t be loved if you don’t ever let anyone get close enough to you to do it.”_

A weathered-looking male in a jacket the same color as hers shuffled into the bus stop. He sat down at a respectful distance and lit the little twig dangling from his lips and began to puff on it.

Human males had been a mixed bag so far. Some were like Earl. Some were kindly enough. Most looked at her like she was something to eat and didn’t really listen to her when she spoke. This one seemed empathetic enough as he let the hateful-smelling smoke roll in and out of his mouth. His grizzled face looked tired, and not late at night tired.Life tired.

He was looking at her, but not in a predatory way. He was looking, actually, at her jacket. “Afghanistan?” he asked, in a friendly enough tone.

“Hm?”

He tugged at his own jacket, which was cut differently from hers but was the same dull green. “Fortieth infantry. Three tours in Afghanistan. You?”

She realized he was former military. It appeared she had accidentally purchased a military jacket in the used clothing store. Well, it was appropriate enough.When it doubt, it was safest to nod.

He nodded. Seeing her crinkled-up nose, he apologized, “Sorry if my smoke bothers you. It helps me stay warm.”

She nodded again. “It’s alright,” she said politely.

“Army hasn’t paid my checks in two years.” He shook his head. “Guess they’re screwing you about the same.”

She nodded again, but she wished he would stop talking. She was missing the broadcast and the batteries were going to die out any time now.

“Doesn’t take much to get down on your luck, does it.”

“No.” That was the first thing he’d said that truly made sense.

“Got work?”

She frowned. She wasn’t used to the vernacular. “Hm?”

“A job.You got a job?”

Employment. “No. Not really.”

He patted his knee. “I can’t do a lot with the bad knee, took a bunch of shrapnel in it in Kandahar and it’s never worked right since, but if you’re in good shape, you can go outside of town, up Route 475, there’s usually groups of the Mexicans up there looking for work in the fields.”

She processed this information. “The pay is good?”

He shrugged. “Better than nothing.”

The inserts beeped once to let her know that they were about to die. She heard the woman say, _“…and just know, if you think you’re alone, you’re not alone. I’m lonely too, so even if you can’t talk to me, or you don’t know how, if you’re listening to this, then neither of us is alone.”_

 

 

*********

 

 

Astra had put together that there was a labor class in this area that came over from outside the nation’s borders. There was a great deal she hadn’t yet come to understand about the dynamic of the situation, but they spoke a different language than the one she had been learning.

The group was chatting away amiably among themselves, waiting in the parking lot of a filling station. Her inserts were dead now, so she had no way of knowing what they were saying to each other. She walked up, looked around at them, tried to assess the situation. They were dressed in loose, comfortable clothing that would keep them warm in a cold morning and then be removed in layers as the day grew hotter.The group was mostly adults, with a few young teenagers and children.Most wore caps, not unlike the one she had taken from Earl. As she drew near to them, a middle aged man dressed this way approached her and said something in his language.

She blinked, looking at him uncomprehendingly.

He switched to the language she knew, though it appeared he didn’t know much more than she did. “You need people?”

He was asking if she was a boss. He was probably assuming this because she looked more like one of the bosses than she did a laborer. She shook her head. “I need work.”

He looked surprised, gave her a little lopsided smile, then shrugged. “OK. _Habla español_?”

She shrugged and shook her head.

He looked mildly surprised again, but continued to smile in a friendly way.He looked at her jacket. “Army?”

She nodded.

“Go Army,” he said jovially. He put his hand out.“Elario.”

She hesitated. Introductions were always still odd. She mostly avoided them when she could. She went with the pseudonym she had first chosen.“Angela,” she said, grasping his hand. They shook briefly and then he beckoned her over to the group.

The conversation became momentarily quiet when she came over with him. Elario appeared to briefly explain that she too was looking for work, and there was a back and forth of questions and answers, which mostly were met with “ _Yo no se,_ ” and “ _A quien le importa?_ ” She stood around awkwardly after that, hands thrust into the side pockets of her jacket, watching her breath hang in the air in the early morning chill.

A pair of trucks came later, the kind with the open flat beds in the back. Pickup trucks. A man got out, wearing a straw hat, and came over to the group. He came to Astra first. “You already pick up this group?”

She looked at him. “I don’t understand.”

Elario came sauntering over. He seemed to know the man in the straw hat. “No, no, boss. _Chica rubia,_ she’s with us.” He then switched to his own language, which the boss seemed to speak a little, and they had a brief back and forth. The man in the straw hat looked at her with suspicion, but after a brief exchange, nodded his agreement. She climbed into the back of the track, wedged in with several other laborers, including Elario.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

He smiled. “ _Gracias_ ,” he corrected.

She squinted at him.

“You say, _gracias_ ,” he explained. “Learn some _español, chica_. Make life easier, ok?”

She nodded her comprehension. Of course. Why not learn yet another language? She didn’t understand how a world could begin to function with so many.She sat with her knees tucked up to her chest, bumping roughly along with the rest of the laborers in the back of the truck.

By the time they arrived at the farm they were headed to, it was almost an hour later and she no longer saw her breath in front of her in the air. By the time the sun was high, she knew, she was going to be very warm indeed. They rolled up in front of a large red barn and piled out of the truck, where some more of the men in straw hats waited. They stood at the edge of a field with rows upon rows of nodding, green leaves.

Another boss in a straw hat came up to her and looked doubtfully at her. “What’s your story?” he wondered.

“Need work,” she said tersely.

“Gal that looks like you can’t find anything but this?”

She glanced down at the jacket she wore. What had the man said?“Fortieth infantry. Three tours in Afghanistan. Army hasn’t paid my checks in over two years.”

The boss still seemed skeptical, but he nodded with comprehension. “It’s a damn crime how the government can’t get it together to take care of you all.”He sighed. “I guess if you’re up to it physically, I’ll take you on. But this ain’t answering phones and sending telegrams, and I can’t pay you no better than I do the Mexicans.”

She glanced behind him at several stacks of wooden crates filled with some indistinct green vegetables. “Those go in the truck?” she asked, pointing to a large, enclosed vehicle pulled up beside the barn, where other laborers were already doing some loading.

He nodded.

She walked over, picked up the crates, three at once, walked over to the truck, and loaded them in.She might not be gifted with godlike powers, but she hadn’t had much to do in prison besides push-ups, and she could do about a hundred fifty before she began to even sweat. Wiping her hands on her pants, she turned around to look at the boss with a raised eyebrow, as if to ask, “Satisfied?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “Alright,” he said.“I guess that’ll do.”

 

 

******

 

It would be three long, back-breaking days of work. She had since acquired sunscreen, so she didn’t burn again, but she did become brown enough that she didn’t stick out quite so much. She kept her cap on to avoid anyone seeing her shock of white hair, as it was too strong of an identifying detail for her liking, and she was trying her best to lay low.

The bosses let the migrants stay in the barn, which was cold, but not as bad as sleeping unsheltered. There were a bunch of blankets that seemed intended for the horses, as they were thick and rough, and there weren’t enough for everyone, but most people huddled together and shared. One of the smaller girls came over and said something to Astra in Spanish and then snuggled up next to her and drew the blanket around them both.Astra stiffened a little at the contact, but then relaxed and decided she was too exhausted to be uncomfortable with someone’s child resting a sleepy head on her chest.

She wished her inserts still worked. She wished she could hear that woman’s broadcast.

Elario was patient with her, taught her how to identify which soybean pods were ready to be picked and which needed to stay on the vine a bit longer, and how to pull them off so that she didn’t break the pods. Krypton had not been hospitable to growing green things outdoors, so Astra was somewhat pleased at the opportunity to learn how to harvest food that grew from the ground.

At the end of the three days, she was handed a wad of money that seemed like probably not enough for the amount of work that she had done, but she was glad to get it nevertheless.It was better than what she had gotten for washing dishes that time, and Earl’s money was not going to last forever.

 

 

*******

 

Astra quickly became fluent, or at least functional, in both of the local languages. She ended up traveling with Elario’s group for some six weeks, and seeing a fair bit of the southwestern part of the country. Some of the bosses were decent, paid what they promised, fed and lodged them and made sure they got water when they were working in the hot sun. It was a difficult existence, but she was learning to conserve her resources, and it was easier to travel in a group. On nights when they weren’t able to sleep in a boss’s barn, they would pool money together and get dropped off at a roadside motel and share, ten to a room, sleeping on cots, on the floor, wherever.

She learned a children’s song in Spanish and sang it to Marta, the little girl who had curled up next to her that first night in the barn. The others in the group liked her singing, and soon she had learned a few more songs and could sing harmonies with others in the group who sang well.They ate simple meals, mostly seeming to involve rice, beans, and eggs, and sometimes, if they did particularly well, they got hold of an inebriant they called “tequila” and they drank and celebrated a good job. Astra had always been a figure of temperance, not much interested in losing a grip of her senses, but she did find a small amount of the drink caused her tired muscles to relax a little bit.

She learned other things in her time with this group, as well.

She learned that the laborers who spoke Spanish were not always treated well. She learned that the bosses paid them more or less whatever they felt like, and that sometimes it was less than what was agreed upon. After one such occasion, she became angry.

“We should not put up with this,” she said to Elario, as they rode in a boss’s truck back to their pickup point.

He shrugged, and smiled. “ _Qué podemos hacer?_ ” he said. _What can we do?_ Sometimes this was the way it was.

Her Spanish was not very good, not for these kinds of conversations. She tried her best to express that they should go and fight back, that they should organize themselves and demand better.

He shook his head, smiling sympathetically at her. “ _Rubia, no entiendes._ ” _You don’t understand, blondie._

“You’re right,” she grumbled, “I don’t understand.”

 

 

*****

 

They had finished a four-day stint on a farm that grew chile peppers, somewhere outside Fondo Gordo, and Astra was exhausted.She had worn gloves, as had the others, but a few of the group still had irritated skin and eyes, because it was inevitable that a few peppers would always break open here or there. She was conserving her biogel, but Marta had touched her mother’s gloves, and after a few hours, the skin on those fingertips had become an angry red.

Elario’s crew had gotten used to coming to her when they had minor injuries. She was carrying a medkit after all, and she had certainly more than her fair share of experience with field dressing wounds. She often bound up cut hands and once or twice may have put biogel on a laborer’s broken finger that would “inexplicably” heal a few days later.

On this particular evening, with so many of them tired and needing aid, she was in no mood to have Elario hand her a wad of green money that was smaller than it ought to be. She counted through it quickly. “This is only half,” she said.“Why so little?”

Elario shook his head. It was one of those times.

Astra stalked away, grabbed a long-handled hoe, and marched into the boss’s office in the back of the shed. He was sitting at his desk, drinking a coffee.

She waved the wad of cash at him.“This is not enough.”

He shook his head. “Take it up with your group.”

“No.” She brandished the hoe. “This was not what was agreed to. I know what your people told Elario. I was there.”

She was aware that he was glancing past her, and could hear footsteps behind her.She clutched the hoe with both hands like a battle staff.

“If your guy didn’t give you the money, it ain’t my problem.”

She lowered her voice. “You think that because these people are from somewhere else, that you can treat them how you please.”

He smiled tightly at her. “Well, honestly, I can. I don’t know why exactly you’re running with them, attractive white woman like you could be doing better for yourself, but it ain’t my problem. They got no rights.”

She twirled the hoe once and then planted the business end into the wall beside his chair. He flinched, and she saw with some satisfaction that his face paled a few shades.“Give. Me. The. Money.”

He put his hands up in a gesture of surrender, but she could tell from his nervousness and the way he kept glancing toward the door, that she was about to be set upon by a couple of farmhands.

She heard a sound, then. There was indeed a farmhand in the doorway, and he held a shotgun. It was a primitive weapon, she had seen it in action, but it didn’t need to be advanced. It could blow a hole the size of a fist in her either way.Biting off a curse, she dropped the hoe and put her hands up.

The farmhand nudged her outside and kept her standing, shuffling her feet in front of the shed for several minutes, glaring at her in stoic silence, waiting for what, she wasn’t sure. Then she saw the flashing blue and red lights of vehicles like the ones she’d seen the night she arrived here. Authorities. That was never good news for her.

Four of them got out of the car, inspecting her with skepticism. “This her?”

The boss nodded. “Mind you, I don’t wanna hurt nobody too much, I’m sure to need these Mexicans again…”

The police officer nodded. He and his companions arranged themselves around her and took thick, heavy-looking black sticks out of their belts.

Astra put up a brave fight, but in the end, there were four, and they were armed, and she wasn’t. Elario helped her to the boss’s truck when it was over so that they could be dropped at a roadside motel nearby, since the boss wasn’t about to lodge them for the night after this. She had a little blood in her mouth and was bruised in places that biogel couldn’t fix.She drank tequila and slept.

In her mind, as she drifted off, she heard the voice of the radio broadcast: “ _Even if you can’t talk to me, or you don’t know how, if you’re listening to this, then neither of us is alone.”_


End file.
